GoogleCL: Control Your Google Apps From the Command Line

As of today, true nerds, geeks, and Internet trolls can perform their Googling tasks straight from their Terminal window with a new program called GoogleCL. The GoogleCL tool can be used for your Blogger, Calendar, Contacts, Docs, Picasa, and YouTube and is supported by Windows, Linux, and Mac.

Caution: Geek Speak ahead. These instructions assume that you're familiar--and comfortable--with using the command line. (This is GeekTech, after all!)

LifeHacker has posted instructions for installing GoogleCL on Unix- or Linux-based systems, but this is how I went about installing it on Windows Vista (presumably these instructions will work on Windows 7, but I haven't tried it out).

The first thing I did is make sure I had Python 2.5 or above installed, as well as the latest version of the Google Data Python Library. Windows users will also need Cygwin, a Linux like-environment for Windows. All of these are really easy to install. Next I went to GoogleCL downloads page and downloaded the latest g-zipped file (version 0.9.5 as of this writing). I left both the g-zipped Google Data Python Library and the GoogleCL files in the Downloads directory in my user home folder (per LifeHacker's instructions), and then I unzipped them using 7-Zip.

Now you can do the next steps two different ways. I'll show you the easiest using Cygwin and the Linux commands, however you can use run and the Windows command line(Run-->cmd) if you are ambitious. The first step is to navigate to where you unzipped the files, this case in the ~/Downloads directory. First open a terminal window, we'll use your previously installed Cygwin. Then enter the following commands (making corrections to the directory if not in downloads, of course):

cd “~/Downloads/gdata-2.0.10/”

sudo python setup.py install

cd “Downloads/googlecl-0.9.5/”

sudo python setup.py install

In case you don't know, you can get to a drive by simply typing: cd followed by the drive name. For example, to get to your C: drive, type cd c: and press return.

And you can navigate from there. If you have any spaces in any folder names then put a quotation marks around everything; for example: cd “Bad Folder Name” or cd “c:Users/I Have a Horrible User Name”.

At this point GoogleCL will be installed and ready to use. When you first start it up it will prompt you for your Google username. Once you enter that, it will give you a link to put into your Web browser; going to this page will give GoogleCL access to your account. Once you do this, go back to Cygwin and hit enter to finish giving all of the apps in GoogleCL access.

With GoogleCL installed, you'll be able to do a bunch of tasks from uploading a full folder of folders to Picasa, editing your Google Docs to uploading videos on YouTube straight from your Terminal. Indeed, true Geekdom is here at last!